Advanced Flat Rate Shipping Method For WooCommerce Review

If you run a WooCommerce store, being able to accurately calculate shipping is important both for your costs and so that your customers understand exactly how much they’ll pay for shipping.

In today’s Advanced Flat Rate Shipping Method For WooCommerce review, I’ll be taking a look at a plugin that does just that by giving you much more control over how shipping rates function at your WooCommerce store.

If you have a WooCommerce store that sells and ships physical products, you’ll want to give this one a read.

Advanced Flat Rate Shipping Method For WooCommerce Features

As the name suggests, Advanced Flat Rate Shipping Method For WooCommerce gives you a lot more control over how flat shipping rates function at your WooCommerce store. You’ll get a ton of new conditions on which to calculate shipping rates. Here’s the full list:

• Country
• State
• Zip code
• Zone
• A specific product in cart
• Product in a certain category in cart
• Product with a certain tag in cart
• A specific SKU’s product in cart
• User
• User role
• Cart subtotal
• Quantity
• Weight
• Coupon
• Shipping class

What’s more, you can use AND conditions to link multiple shipping conditions together, which lets you really fine-tune your shipping rules to your business.

You can also add extra fees to your flat-rate shipping calculations based on:

• Product
• Product category
• Total number of items in cart
• Product weight
• Category weight
• Total weight in cart

And because there are so many options, you’ll also get tools to handle what happens if multiple flat-rate shipping rules apply to the same order.

Overall:

• It’s easy to use.
• No technical knowledge required.
• You can create as many shipping methods as needed.

Keep reading and I’ll give you a hands-on look at all of the features…

Hands-On With Advanced Flat Rate Shipping Method For WooCommerce

First off, I should say that Advanced Flat Rate Shipping Method For WooCommerce offers a full-featured admin demo. So if you’d prefer to go hands-on yourself, you can check that out here. You can also check out some tutorials on using the plugin at the developer’s blog.

Shipping Overview

In the plugin’s main dashboard, you’ll get an overview of all your shipping methods, as well as the ability to make one key decision:

Because of how many conditions the plugin lets you use, there are almost certainly going to be situations where multiple flat-rate shipping options could apply if a shopper is purchasing multiple items.

Thankfully, the plugin lets you account for this and gives you four options to choose what happens when multiple flat-rate shipping rules apply:

1. Let the customer choose.
2. Automatically apply the highest shipping option.
3. Automatically apply the lowest shipping option.
4. Force all the shipping methods (that is, combine them together)

Depending on which option you choose, you might get an additional choice.

For example, if you opt to let the customer choose, you can choose between displaying the available shipping options as a drop-down or radio buttons.

Or, if you opt to force all the shipping methods, you can choose whether or not to include the default WooCommerce shipping methods in this calculation or only tally up shipping methods that you’ve created with Advanced Flat Rate Shipping Method For WooCommerce.

So, that handles a situation when multiple shipping methods apply, but what about creating those shipping methods?

Creating a New Shipping Method

To create a new shipping method, you can head to the Add New Shipping Method tab in the plugin’s settings.

At the top, you’ll configure some basic settings like:

• Shipping method name (the public name that shoppers will see)
• Price for this shipping option
• Whether or not it’s taxable
• Whether to apply the price based on the number of items in a cart or just for the entire cart
• The estimated shipping time
• A start and end date. This is optional and only applies if you want to run this shipping method for limited dates. The shipping method will automatically enable and then disable based on these dates.

Shipping Classes

Then, the Additional Shipping Charges Based on Shipping Class lets you apply additional costs based on the shipping class. These are the actual shipping classes that you set in the WooCommerce settings (WooCommerce → Settings → Shipping → Shipping classes).

You can decide whether to charge for each shipping class individually or only charge for the most expensive shipping class:

Shipping Method Rules

Then, you can actually configure your shipping rule(s) using the Shipping Method Rules section.

Here, you can add one or more conditions that must be met for the shipping method to apply. Again, your options are:

• Country
• State
• Zip code
• Zone
• A specific product in cart
• Product in a certain category in cart
• Product with a certain tag in cart
• A specific SKU’s product in cart
• User
• User role
• Cart subtotal
• Quantity
• Weight
• Coupon
• Shipping class

Depending on which rule you’re talking about, you can also use all or some of the following operators:

• Equal to
• Not equal to
• Less than
• Less than or equal to
• Greater than
• Greater than or equal to

You can add as many rules as you want.

For example, you could say:

• Country is equal to Vietnam
• Quantity is less than or equal to 5
• User role is equal to customer
• Etc

Advanced Shipping Price Rules

The Advanced Shipping Price Rules section lets you optionally apply additional costs to your shipping method based on:

• Product
• Product category
• Total number of items in cart
• Product weight
• Category weight
• Total weight in cart

For each option, you can select a minimum and a maximum, as well as the fee to apply:

You can also add as many rules as you want here, and you can also add rules across different conditions.

For example, you could have one rule based on products and another rule based on total weight:

So while it might take some time to go through and set everything up, you really do get a ton of control over your shipping methods.

Creating a New Shipping Zone

In addition to managing shipping methods, the plugin also helps you create and manage shipping zones.

Shipping zones are helpful if you want to apply a method to a group of locations. One neat thing is that you can get more specific than just country-level shipping zones. In total, you can create shipping zones based on:

• Country
• State or county
• Postal code

For example, you could create one shipping zone for the continental USA to exclude Alaska and Hawaii.

You can then use these shipping zones in your shipping methods.

Advanced Flat Rate Shipping Method For WooCommerce Pricing

Advanced Flat Rate Shipping Method For WooCommerce comes in both a free version at WordPress.org and a premium version.

The free version limits which conditions you can use to create your shipping rules. You’ll be able to create flat-rate shipping rules for:

• Specific products
• Categories of products
• Countries

But that’s it. If you want all of the other flat-rate shipping rules, you’ll need to upgrade to the Pro version.

The Pro version offers both annual plans and lifetime plans. With the annual plan, you’ll get one year of support and updates. With the lifetime plan, you’ll obviously get support and updates for life.

Here’s how the pricing shakes out:

• 1 site – $99 annually or $299 lifetime
• 5 sites – $199 annually or $599 lifetime
• Unlimited sites – $249 annually or $749 lifetime

All plans come with a 14-day money-back guarantee, so you’re not risking anything if the plugin doesn’t do what you need it to.

Final Thoughts on Advanced Flat Rate Shipping Method For WooCommerce

If you want more control over flat-rate shipping options at your WooCommerce store, Advanced Flat Rate Shipping Method For WooCommerce is a great option to consider.

It gives you a ton of flexibility over how your shipping methods function and it will let you present accurate flat-rate shipping information to your shoppers.

To get started, you can play around with the free version at WordPress.org or the full-featured admin demo. Then, consider going Pro to access all of the shipping options:

Get Advanced Flat Rate Shipping Method For WooCommerce